


After

by FrostbitePanda



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies), Mad Max: Fury Road
Genre: Angst, F/M, Furiosa Healing, Gen, Introspection, POV Multiple, Post-Movie(s), feelings all around, fluff-ish, lots of dealing with feelings, the wives ship Furiosa/Max
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-09
Updated: 2016-01-12
Packaged: 2018-05-05 20:55:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,891
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5390006
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FrostbitePanda/pseuds/FrostbitePanda
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Do you remember? Anything?"</p><p>Furiosa looks at her for a moment, and her expression makes Dag think of a desperate refugee, raking through the dry ashes of a dead fire to find that one last, brilliant ember to keep the wolves away.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Capable knows days after.

It's not a grand gesture, by any means. It happens on a quiet afternoon, her turn to sit bedside with Furiosa. Capable is sheafing through parchment, rotted notebook paper, stained rolls of canvas, dry, crumbling vellum. She whiles away the hours ticking off inventories, highlighting schematics for water pumps, studying wartime architecture.

She stops at Furiosa's low groan. She is beaded with sweat, brow pinched and pained. Capable shifts the pile of documents onto the floor, standing and leaning over her.

The fever burning through Furiosa often spirited her to other places, the boiling thermals in her flesh sparking lurid dreams before her eyes. One night, Capable had awoke to hear Furiosa talking, clearly, cheerfully, to who she could only assume to be her mother. It was as if she were a girl again, good and green and cheeks streaked with mud. Capable had stood and taken her hand in her own and Furiosa had stilled, her face pulled taut under the dark weight of pain once more.

This time however, Furiosa whispers. Capable can't recall if she had ever heard Furiosa speak with such soft, low tones. Furiosa was an engine revving underfoot, ricochet ringing off a cliffside, desert wind against the dunes.

She's repeating the same three words, disbelief singing her words with a burning, acidic tragedy that made Capable sit back down on her chair, heavy and sodden with it.

"You came back," Furiosa says again, louder, almost joyous.

That's when Capable knows.

+++

Dag knows weeks after.

Dag was an observer. It was instinctual, a hobby she relished in. Information was the best weapon out here for someone who was not able to wield a gun or drive a car or throw a punch.

Furiosa was one of her favorite subjects. Furiosa, the savior, the enigma. The woman who had folded them up in her War Rig with the promise of her skin being flayed from her bones by desert storm if their plot was discovered. The woman who had crawled over two pursuit vehicles with blood on her teeth to kill the god who had enslaved them for so long. All these things she was to them, and The Dag still did not _know_ her.

So she watched her, at her most vulnerable. Coughing and pallid and leaning on a cane in the gardens. "Fresh air is what you need for them lungs," Dag hears Vyrie tell her one day in the Healing Ward.

She was the same, but burnt. The savage chase of death had left her much like scorched glass after a fire. The glass was still as it always had been, in the end, but it came away blackened and sooty and had to be scrubbed and polished before it's lustre returned. She spoke little and her breath caught in her lungs like a bad gear. She sat with a Vuvalini blanket wrapped tight over her pinched, sagging shoulders and avoided any gaze that did not belong to the Wives.

Today, it's flat and gray and a storm is fuming to the south. Lightning splinters purple and vivid in the roiling thunderhead like sparked faultlines and Dag knows she's thinking of the rage of that storm, ages ago now, that had saved them as good as any well-placed bullet.

Dag comes to sit next to her, hair whipping in the wind that will surely carry that storm right to them. She can hear the people below batting down the hatches in preparation for it. Her saplings have been hastily dug up and taken to the Green Room and she hopes the tarps are good enough for the rest of it.

She brings her dirty knees to her chest and she breathes in the sweet scent of good earth. She turns to Furiosa and squints. Her faces is drawn, pale and her eyes rage quietly, distantly. It makes Dag think of those pictures she used to brush wondrous fingers over in the witching hours in the Vault. Pictures of frothing ocean, foam boiling on crests of furious waves whipped by rain and wind.

It's the closest Furiosa has come to looking like herself in quite a while and Dag knows that she is looking into that storm and thinking of him.

"His name is Max, you know."

Furiosa blinks, eyes refocusing as she turns to look at her. "What?"

"Do you remember? Anything?"

Furiosa looks at her for a moment, and her expression makes Dag think of a desperate refugee, raking through the dry ashes of a dead fire to find that one last, brilliant ember to keep the wolves away. There's an instant of agony and loss writ large on her face before she folds it back up again and turns away.

"He saved you."

"I know that," Furiosa returns quickly, as if Dag had insulted her by implying that she didn't.

Dag presses her lips together, turns her face back towards the wind. She's silent for a time, folding her arms over her knees and resting her chin on her wrist.

"He... told you his name?" Furiosa finally ventures, looking sidelong at her before darting her eyes away.

Dag barks, turns her head back towards her. "He told _you_ his name. I heard it out of fortuitous circumstance."

Dag watches Furiosa's mouth, a mouth that spat commands for kill shots and shaped the syllables of war on her tongue. The corner tugs ever so slightly upward and her eyes still and soften.

That's when Dag knows.

+++

Cheedo knows 34 days after.

Furiosa is up and almost fully healed. She sits down more often and always has a cane close by, but her voice has regained its fire, her spine its steel, her eyes glinting with rekindled purpose.

Cheedo takes her through the kitchens, to show her the improvements they've made, the expansions now underway. Furiosa nods, approving. When Cheedo explains the system they've devised to make the nutritious bean cakes with great speed and efficiency, the girl thinks she sees Furiosa smile.

The Healing Ward is bit of a different matter and Furiosa is reluctant to go with her, after having burned away infection and madness within its walls for almost 20 days.

"We're almost done with the cleaning and whitewashing," Cheedo tells her as Furiosa picks up a scalpel, new and gleaming and free of rust. "It'll be a proper hospital in a few weeks."

Furiosa's mouth twists up, almost ironic, as if her cynical brain had flickered on and told her that the idea of a hospital-- _in this place_ \-- was too foolish a thing to hope for.

Cheedo walks to her, head bowed and eyes serious. "We need donors," she says quietly, glancing at her carefully. "Volunteers, of course, but we need them."

Furiosa nods, placing the scalpel down and walking towards the ramshackle pile in the corner of the hall. It was a tangle of rusted metal, skeletons of iron used to store the blood bags.

Cheedo hesitates, watching as the woman's shoulders roll back, tensing and transmuting to cold-rolled steel. As the girl draws level with her, she can almost _feel_ heat sloughing off her like sun-baked earth.

Furiosa toes one of the cages with her boot and it scrapes loudly on the stained stone floor. She closes her eyes and Cheedo knows what she sees, bright and all too real. Furiosa was once Imperator, a woman charged with Joe's most precious cargo, like prospective blood bags. Furiosa knew-- terribly well-- what were done to the wretches once she delivered them in the hands of the Organic.

Cheedo reaches a hesitant hand out, as if reaching for a fire poker she isn't sure is too hot to touch. She wraps careful fingers over her palm and Furiosa heaves out a great breath at the gesture. "We burn them," she says, her voice a death knell. "Melt them down, make them something..."

"Beautiful?" Cheedo suggests.

She sees Furiosa's face flicker, smile catching on on corner of her mouth. She nods, blinking and looking up at a shaft of sunlight blazing in from one of the many skylights. Cheedo thinks she could almost look _happy_ , if it wasn't for the small lines of sadness etched around her eyes.

That's when Cheedo knows.

+++

Toast knows 177 days after.

Toast the Shrewd, the Skeptic, she was sometimes called. She likes these better than Toast the Knowing. 'Knowing' was too mystic a thing to be her.

Furiosa is back to her full strength, a new and shiny chrome arm glinting and deadly in the sun. She paces through ranks of War Pups, telling them of things like _protection_ and _vigilance_ and _cooperation_. No talk of Valhalla or dying historic or chromed out death marches. Toast watches with a toothpick in her teeth as the Pups look up at their Imperator with wide eyes and uncertain mouths.

Toast goes out on patrols and trade missions with Furiosa, but more often, it seems that Furiosa is going with _her_ and Toast can't help the happy swell in her chest as she kicks her bike into life.

They're cresting a hill, and Toast is checking her ten when she hears a War Boy shout from her other side. Her eyes snap to where he's pointing and Furiosa is already lifting her rifle, scope to her eye, as presses on the brakes of her bike.

Toast slows to a stop, raising her binoculars to her eyes and peers at the smudge of black metal and orange dust against the blue of the sky.

There's a beat of silence and then, without so much as a word or look, Furiosa slings her gun on her back and takes off like a missile.

"Hey!" Toast shouts, almost indignant, but mostly alarmed. They were on patrol, in territory that was fairly unknown, in very troubled times. And her Imperator had just taken off by herself towards a vehicle they knew nothing about.

Her and the War Boys take off after her and Toast is already running through attack plans and rescue missions as they close the gap on the car. It seems to have stopped and a man has stepped out. A man, who is as shabby as the car he drove, pinched and road weary, but the brace on his leg and the patched up jacket are unmistakable.

Should have known better.

Furiosa is off her bike in a second. It crashes into the sand in her haste. She looks murderous, her breath heaving from her lungs and her muscles taut as tripwire. Toast is sure that Max is about to receive a great blow to the jaw, but if he also thinks this, he is showing no signs of defending himself.

Furiosa stops a few feet from him, her chest still working like a bellows. Toast sees her eyes dart to his right shoulder, where a cannula still rested, wound up like silver thread. Furiosa lurches forward, arm raised and outstretched, and Max mirrors her, bringing her brow to his like he was completing a circuit, like he had been waiting years to be welcomed into Furiosa's tribe.

Toast watches as Furiosa lifts her head a bit, and knocks their brows together, shaking her head in disbelief. They are silent for a long moment. "You look like shit," she finally says and Toast can't be sure, but she thinks her voice almost sounds shaky.

Toast hears Max grunt and it could have been mistaken for a laugh and Furiosa pulls back and she's fucking _smiling_.

That's when Toast knows.

+++ 

_Through fire below, and fire above, and fire within_

_sleep through the things that couldn’t have been_

_if you hadn’t have been_

_\-- "Only Skin"_ Joanna Newsom


	2. Chapter 2

Max knows 167 days after.

He perhaps knew before then, but never would turn his face to it, keeping it to his back like the sun, like the the three spires in the sand.

Leaving was the best thing he had ever done. He was terribly good at it. Better at escape than he was at driving and shooting and catching lizards. It was the best thing for him-- the best thing for the people who found themselves in the unfortunate circumstance of crossing his path.

  
Leaving the Citadel should have been the easiest exit he had ever made-- done with a practiced ease, well-worn muscle memory that only needed the slightest twitch to trigger. But he had found that his legs were snared in trip wires when he had turned away, when he had staggered into a deserted machine bay where he had pilfered a bike and felt so fucking guilty about it, he left a half-empty clip on the ground in exchange. He would have gotten spit in his face if he had tried that trade pretty much anywhere else.

  
He had blamed it on the sudden drain of adrenaline, on the oppressive exhaustion that rose over him like hungry quicksand. His hands had shook and his legs could just barely kick the throttle and his vision blurred at the edges.

Some of that turmoil bled away in the hiss of flying sand and the roar of the engine. Evaporating like fog in the face of a new-risen sun.

  
Until the voices returned, finding him in the cold desert nights like starving dingoes. Eyes blazing like watchfires, mouths agape in anguish as they shouted his name like an ugly slur, made thirsty and resentful by how long he had evaded them.

Yet, his tires still thrum over sand like war drums and he scrambles over dunes for lizards and blisters them black over fires that feed on scraps of leather and sedge. He curls in the sparse shade of his bike when his eyes burn too much from the sun to keep going. He trades ammo for water and water for fuel at the small scraps of trading posts he visits. He stabs the saddle of his thumb, night after night, marking what he finds on a rag he had spread on a Vuvalini bike days and days ago.

One hundred and sixty-seven days of restless nights and endless drives, one hundred and sixty-seven days of trying to not think of those spires in the sand, of those four girls on the rising platform, of the woman with vengeance in her voice and redemption in her eyes.

He should have known when his nightmares of fire and blood would sometimes splinter into _dreams_. Dreams where he drove and she slept against the door, long neck stretched like the finest muslin. Dreams where he would walk into the Citadel and his feet would take him to her like bloodhounds on a scent trail, just so he could look at her breathing-- in and out. Dreams that always took him to her, serene and powerful and so very _alive_.

He should have known when he almost killed a man he had overheard in the slums of the Bullet Farm, drunkenly hypothesizing about what the Bag of Nails must have been like in bed. How the Wives must have scream.

But he knew walking slowly through a sorry excuse of a trading post. It had once been a fuel station, now left to only one derelict building and a few scraps of sun-blasted asphalt. Some particularly intrepid trader had managed to salvage a sign that read 'thank you, come again!' to post at the front of the little encampment. Because of this (but perhaps more so such niceties had become so irrelevant in the world they may as well belonged to a long-dead dialect) the few patrons who frequented the place referred to the outpost as _Thank You Come Again_.

Max had been here before. He liked coming here, actually. It was never crowded, which he could appreciate. And although the lack of traffic did mean smaller pickings, it also meant less competition. People here were a particular kind of desperate.

He sees it almost immediately, gleaming white and chrome in the desert-noon sun.

A scope. It looks so _new_ \-- no dents, no scratches, no rust. New things were so rare in this world, it was like seeing a deer, a flower. He was pulled to it like a coney caught in a snare.

He picks it up (ignoring the vendor's loud protestations), his hands careful and steady, peering through it. No dirt, no bubbles from water leaking in, no scratches from sand or breaks in the lens. A lethal addition to a lethal marksman.

He feels a weight growing his chest, such a tremendous _pull_ on his being, looking through that scope, that when he brings it away from his face he says, "What do you want for it?"

"What d'ya have?"

He digs through his jacket, pulling out a bag of roasted locusts and a bundle of kindling, a small knife and a scrap of jerky.

As he had suspected, the toothless vendor either does not know what she has, or doesn't much care. The locusts and jerky would feed her for days and the kindling would keep her warm for longer.

With a hearty cackle, she gathers up his offering and he turns away, clutching the scope with white knuckles. One hundred and sixty-seven days ago, the scope would have meant next to nothing to him. One hundred and sixty-seven days ago, he would have marvelled at its condition and moved on-- trading for lizards and bullets and water.

Now, the scope promises at least three days of hunger, three cold nights pressed to the dying warmth of his bike's tailpipe. Three days of struggle and it was as fair of trade he could ever think of.

That is when Max knew.

+++

Furiosa knew 186 days after.

They were patrolling. Nothing more. Max had stayed like he belonged there, like he had never left. As if this was all a part of the plan and she didn't have the good sense to ask him why. He had slept on a bed roll in her room and they made sure the weapons were stashed away and the door locked tight and she had prudently ignored the swell in her chest when she found him installing the new scope on her rifle the next morning.

They had been swamped. Their little convoy overtaken by a booby trap and some well-placed scavengers. She would have known better, but Toast was still young and green and Furiosa remembers her own initial patrols and the heavy price they came with.

Max had left her, sprinting away to help a War Boy with two scavengers on his flanks, thirsting for the fresh ammo from the Bullet Farm he stood on. She stayed back with the rig, rifle couched to her shoulder, trying to find an open shot as she propped the muzzle on the side view.

A heavy blow to the back of her skull brought her spitting and scuffling in the sand, lurid colors splashing on her retinas, pain breaking like a sandstorm on a blasted rock.

She must've screamed, because her throat is burning. She rolls over onto her back to see the muzzle of a pistol swimming into deadly focus as her eyes adjust. She grapples for her rifle, but it's too late.

The gunshot blazes in her ears, setting off a ringing claxon that blots out all other sound. She waits for the red-hot blast of tearing flesh, the warm bloom of blood over her chest.

But there is nothing and for a split second she thinks that maybe she's already dead. But she blinks away her shock and turns her head see Max and her would-be assassin rolling in the dirt beside her. She sees Max lift a fist and bring it down in a savage swing. The assailant goes still, but still Max hammers at him, throwing punch after terrible punch.

She struggles upright, tries to find her voice, " _Max!_ " she finally rasps.

He stops, breath heaving. He raises his hands and looks down at them, wet with crimson and shaking with battle. He slowly turns to her and his face is _haunted_ , deathly white. His eyes burn like hungry funeral pyres against the angry red streaks that cover his face. He looks so fucking relieved, she thinks he might faint.

She starts to crawl toward him but he's holding out his hand, head shaking from side to side as he stands. He walks over to her and crouches in front of her. His expression seizes her around the middle like an iron band, paralyzing her. Sadness, torment, relief... _love_. He lifts shaking hands to her face, stroking with rough thumbs. He runs his palm softly over the back of her head. He winces at what he finds and unwinds the scarf-- _her scarf_ \-- from around his neck. He pillows it behind her neck, urging her back down into the sand.

But she can't move. Her breath is shorting out, her heart clamoring for purchase. She can only wrap her flash arm around his neck, her eyes burning with a terrible and foreign pain.

He moves closer haltingly, until she can feel his arms twine around her back, hands decals of warmth and strength on her spine. The buzzing in her ears is dying and she can hear the breath leave him, long and slow and laborious.

She doesn't know why, or when, but she is laughing against him, knuckles going white in his hair. Short barks of a joyous sound that are alien and unbecoming in the world. Especially when she can feel wetness on her face and her vision is splintered into colors so bright and clear that she has to slam her eyes shut in order to bare any of it.

Her nose is pressed into his neck and she can feel the pulse of his jugular and smell his sand and salt and blood. Life. Dirty, but pure and vital and she thinks... before him, she was a dead woman. Dead from the flesh flayed from her bones after being captured by Joe, dead from riding out into salt and nothing else, dead because of a knife in her side, dead from a bullet between the eyes for nothing at all.

Furiosa before, was alone and staring down death at every turn and shouldbe _dead_.

Max before was also dead-- bled dry in the Chop Shop, desiccated in a flat plane of sand, crushed under the tires of a War Rig.

Together, they were _alive_. Together...

It should have hit her before, should have struck her like a bolt of heat lightning in the dry dunes. She had been alone in this world for so long she couldn't bare the thought of letting someone that close. It never had occurred to her that she couldn't bear the thought of going back to that life, of going back to death, but there was no room for that in the world they were building now and she only hoped Max would be there with her for it all.

" _Fool_ ," she croaks into the shell of his ear and she hears a soft hum of assent into her shoulder and feels his arms tighten around her, his face burrow into her shoulder, making a shelter with the reality of her living body. She's not very sure if she ever wants to leave.

That's when Furiosa knows.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really don't know with this. This was really a tribute to my dear friend sociallyawkwardlibra, of whom I had been really deeply involved with an RP. I played Max and am eternally grateful for, as it made me a better writer and allowed me to delve deeper into his head. I did not participate in the Mad Max Secret Santa because at the time I was trying to distance myself from the fandom. But this bit of writing is my belated Secret Santa to her, to make up for me dropping from the radar. 
> 
> If you're reading this, my dear friend, I still love you dearly and think of you often. This is my Christmas gift to you. Enjoy <3 
> 
> And that gose to all of you crazy Wastelanders too. This fandom is small, but a treasure, and everything I write is just a love letter to you all. I hadn't written in three years. This movie and this amazing fandom brought me back and I've written four multi-chaps and three one shots. That's more of a gift than I can ever hope for. Keep on being awesome.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm stuck on Rangeland so I'm distracting myself with trying to think of the aftermath of the events of Fury Road. This story will probably have one more chapter with Max and Furiosa POVs. 
> 
> The head-knock at the end is a nod to sacrificethemtosquid's infinitely amazing Length and Breadth of Fury Road. :)
> 
> Enjoy!


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